Ways To Improve Your Guitar Playing in 2 Minutes
Some days, we often find ourselves picking up the guitar and aimlessly playing for hours without any focus, direction or practice regime set in place. Whilst there should always be time for simply having fun and playing the guitar, this lack of discipline can often find us needing more motivation or even stuck in a dreaded rut. By putting some simple measures in place, we can transform our practice management, improve our guitar playing with fast results, and still block time out for simply playing. Of course, no magic solution will fix all of your problems in 2 minutes alone; nothing in life is quite that simple. However, with some simple self-assessment, planning and dedication, we can use specific 2-minute workouts to bolster the areas of our guitar playing we need to improve. Here are some valuable tips to help you implement a 2-minute system that works best for you.
1. Decide What Your Weakness Are & What You Want To Improve
Though it can be a humbling experience, assessing your weaknesses is one of the most critical skills any guitar player can have. Why? Simply, it forces you to face the reality of your technical shortcomings and see what is holding your improvement back. However, the positive side to this is that it also shows you what your strengths are, allowing you to create confident solutions to take them even further. Great at sweep picking but suck at alternate picking? Well, it doesn’t mean you only have to funnel your focus to the area in which you are underperforming. There’s no reason one should suffer because of emphasis on the other.
Being honest with yourself about what you need to improve will permit you to begin planning areas of practice with clear goals and a concise representation of where your guitar playing level is at. It’s also important to know what you want to improve and, despite what miles on the clock you have as a guitar player, to remember this when looking at what you want or need to improve. With this, we can start to set out short and long-term goals.
Take 2 minutes before you begin practising, to be honest about what you can improve today and what progress you want to see in a week of dedicated practice planning. It’s a positive habit to get into and a conscientious mental warmup.
2. Time Blocking
Now that you’ve pinpointed what areas of practice will improve your guitar playing, you can now start putting them into time blocks. Time blocking is a powerful and productive practice tool, allowing us to measure our progress in real-time. By chunking these practice areas into 2-minute time blocks, we have a physical representation of the effort we are putting in. It also limits our time, forcing us to put everything we have into those 2 minutes of practice.
This means there is less room for distractions than in a 10-minute practice block, ensuring our focus stays on the area we are trying to improve.
Though, we can take this even further when we think of how many 2-minute practice-specific work-outs we can block into an overall session— 5 2-minute blocks over 10 minutes, ten 2-minute blocks over 20 minutes etc.
What’s great about this is that we can have endless variations of 2-minute time blocks, creating hyper-focused and unique practice sessions, keeping us engaged and excited about what we are doing. You’ll find yourself wanting to practice, looking forward to your next 6-string workout and having measurable session durations to monitor and plan your improvement.
3. Positive Practice
Once you’ve implemented 2-minute time blocks, using them positively and productively is essential. Despite taking the time to figure out the areas in which you feel you need to improve, with such an infinite number of practical and theoretical combinations, it can still be an overwhelming prospect just getting started. Though, there are easy ways we can combat this positively.
For instance, if we determine how many days a week we plan to practice and for how long each day, we can start day blocking in ways that look to achieve our longer-term goals. This then expands to week and month blocking, giving us both achievable short-term and long-term goals, with a positive plan to ensure and navigate our progress. For example, trying to achieve how to successfully learn and play every solo on Van Halen 1 in a day would be a negative method of practice; however, having the plan to achieve this in 6 months is a positive method of practice. It’s all about creating building blocks and allowing yourself to enjoy the small rewards!
4. Express Yourself
As stated earlier, guitar practice doesn’t have to and shouldn’t always be regimented. Sometimes, we need the freedom to be expressive in order to improve, often because we’re putting our practice into the application and a musical context. It’s important to remember that everyone is different, and not everyone responds well to overly disciplined approaches. For example, I find that giving myself 2-minutes of ‘free-play’ when I first pick the guitar up can be a great warmup before beginning a more ordered nature of playing.
It’s also a great way to end a practice session, allowing you to subconsciously process the technical areas you’ve been working to improve.
Take this even further by implementing the use of backing tracks and working on a particular key, harmony or mode that you enjoy playing within.
Though, don’t forget to practice positively also, looking to improve those you are less comfortable with.
Of course, it’s all about finding out what works best for you. Experiment with the order and balance of your 2-minute time blocks between regimented and expressive, as well as the length of your overall practice sessions, before you feel you start losing focus. It’s all about keeping yourself interested: if you’re engaged, you will keep striving for better results. Never underestimate the power of 2 minutes: they all add up!
